Authors: Richard Bach
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Modern fiction, #General & Literary Fiction
"Hope you don't mind ham and cheese," he said. "Ham and cheese and maybe an ant." No handshake, no introduction of any kind.
He was not a large man. Hair to his shoulders, blacker than the rubber of the tire he leaned against. Eyes dark as hawk's eyes, the kind I like in a friend, and in anyone else make me uncomfortable indeed. He could have been a karate master on his way to some violent demonstration.
I accepted the sandwich and a thermos cup of water. "Who are you anyway?" I said. "Years, I've been hopping rides never seen another barnstormer out in the fields."
"Not much else I'm fit to do," he said happily enough. "A little mechanicking, welding, roughneck a bit, skinning Cats; I stay in one place too long, I get problems. So I made the airplane and now I'm in the barn storming business."
"What kind of Cat?" I've been mad for diesel tractors since I was a kid.
"D-Eights, D-Nines. Just for a little while, in
"D-Nines! Big as a house! Double compound low gear, can they really push a mountain?"
"There are better ways of moving mountains," he said with a smile that lasted for maybe a tenth of a second.
I leaned for a minute against the lower wing of his plane, watching him. A trick of the light. . . it was hard to look at the man closely. As if there were a light around his head, fading the background a faint, misty silver.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
What kind of problems did you have?"
Oh, nothing much. I just like to keep moving these days, same as you."
I took my sandwich and walked around his plane. It was a 1928 or 1929 machine, and it was completely unscratched. Factories don't make airplanes as new as his was, parked there in the hay. Twenty coats of hand-rubbed butyrate dope, at least, paint like a mirror pulled tight over the wooden ribs of the thing. Don, in old English gold leaf under the rim of his cockpit, and the registration on the map case said, D. W. Shimoda. The instruments were new out or the box, original 1928 flight instruments. varnished-oak control stick and rudder-bar; throttle, mixture, spark advance at the left. You never see spark advances anymore, even on the best-restored antiques. No scratch anywhere, not a patch on the fabric, not a single streak of engine oil from the cowling. Not a blade of straw on the floor of the cockpit, as though his machine hadn't flown at all, but instead had materialized on the spot through some time warp across half a century. I felt an odd creepy cold on my neck.
"How long you been hopping passengers ?" I called across the plane to him.
"About a month, now, five weeks."
He was lying. Five weeks in the fields and I don't care who you are, you've got dirt and oil on the plane and there's straw on the cockpit floor, no matter what. But this machine. . . no oil on the windshield, no flying-hay stains on the leading edges of wings and tail, no bugs smashed on the propeller. That is not possible for an airplane flying through an
"Why are you not telling me the truth?"
"I have told you the truth, Richard," he said. The name is painted on my air plane, too.
"A person does not hop passengers for a month in a Travel Air without getting a little oil on the plane, my friend, a little dust? One patch in The fabric? Hay, for God's sake, on the floor?"
He smiled calmly at me. "There are some things you do not know."
In that moment he was a strange other planet person. I believed what he said, but I had no way of explaining his jewel air plane parked out in the summer hay field.
"This is true. But some day I'll know them all. And then you can have my airplane, Donald, because I won t need it to fly. He looked at me with interest, and raised his black eyebrows. "Oh? Tell me."
I was delighted. Someone wanted to hear my theory! "People couldn't fly for a long time, I don't think, because they didn't think it was possible, so of course they didn't learn the first little principle of aerodynamics. I want to believe that there's another principle somewhere: we don't need airplanes to fly, or move through walls, or get to planets. We can learn how to do that without machines anywhere. If we want to."
He half-smiled, seriously, and nodded his head one time. "And you think that you will learn what you wish to learn by hopping three-dollar rides out of hayfields. "
"The only learning that's mattered is what I got on my own, doing what I want to do. There isn't, but if there were a soul on earth who could teach me more of what I want to know than my airplane can, and the sky, I'd be off right now to find him. Or her."
The dark eyes looked at me level. "Don't you believe you're guided, if you really want to learn this thing?"
"I'm guided, yes. Isn't everyone ?
I've always felt something kind of watching over me, sort of. "
"And you think you'll be led to a teacher who can help you. "
"If the teacher doesn't happen to be me, yes."
"Maybe that's the way it happens," he said.
A modern new pickup truck hushed down the road toward us, raising a thin brown fog of dust, and it stopped by the field. The door opened, an old man got out, and a girl of ten or so. The dust stayed in the air, it was that still.
"Selling rides, are you?" said the man.
The field was Donald Shimoda's discovery; I stayed quiet.
"Will if you want, won't if you don't."
"And you want the dear Lord's fortune, I suppose."
"Three dollars cash, sir, for nine, ten minutes in the air. That is thirty-three and one-third cents per minute. And worth it, most people tell me."
It was an odd bystander-feeling, to sit there idle and listen to the way this fellow worked his trade. I liked what he said, all low key. I had grown so used to my own way of selling rides ("Guaranteed ten degrees cooler upstairs, folks! Come on up where only birds and angels fly! All of this for three dollars only, a dozen quarters from your purse or pocket . . ."), I had forgotten there might be another.
There's a tension, flying and selling rides alone. I was used to it, but still it was there: if I don't fly passengers, I don't eat. Now when I could sit back, not depending for my dinner on the outcome, I relaxed for once and watched.
The girl stood back and watched, too. Blonde, brown-eyed, solemn-faced, she was here because her grampa was. She did not want to fly.
Most often its the other way around, eager kids and cautious elders, but one gets a sense for these things when it's one's livelihood, and I knew that girl wouldn't fly with us if we waited all summer.
"Which one of you gentlemen . . . ?" the man said.
Shimoda poured himself a cup of water. "Richard will fly you. I'm still on my lunch hour. Unless you want to wait."
"No, sir, I'm ready to go. Can we fly over my farm ?"
"Sure," I said. "Just point the way you want to go, sir." I dumped my bedroll and toolbag and cook pots from the front cockpit of the Fleet, helped the man into the passenger seat and buckled him in. Then I slid down into the rear cockpit and fastened my own seat belt.
"Give me a prop, will you, Done"
"Yep." He brought his water cup with him and stood by the propeller. "What do you want?"
"Hot and brakes. Pull it slow. The impulse will take it right out of your hand."
Always when somebody pulls the Fleet propeller, they pull it too fast, and for complicated reasons the engine won't start. But this man pulled it around ever so slowly, as though he had done it for ever. The impulse spring snapped, sparks fired in the cylinders and the old engine was running, that easy. He walked back to his airplane, sat down and began talking to the girl.
In a great burst of raw horsepower and flying straw the Fleet was in the air, climbing through a hundred feet (if the engine quits now, we land in the corn), five hundred feet (now, and we can turn back and land in the hay. . . now, and it's the cow pasture west), eight hundred feet and level, following the man's finger pointing through the wind southwest.
Three minutes airborne and we circle a farmstead, barns the color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in the back for food sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing.
The man in the front cockpit looked down through the air as we circled the farmhouse framed between the wings and through the flying wires of the Fleet.
A woman appeared on the porch below, white apron over blue dress, waving. The man waved back. They would talk later of how they could see each other so well across the sky.
He looked back at me finally with a nod to say that was enough, thanks, and we could head back now.
I flew a wide circle around Ferris, to let the people know there was flying going on, and spiraled down over the hayfield to show them just where it was happening. As I slipped down to land, banked steeply over the corn, the Travel Air swept off the ground and turned at once toward the farm we had just left.
I flew once with a five-ship circus, and for a moment it was that kind of busy feeling . . . one plane lifting off with passengers while another lands. We touched ground with a gentle rumbling crash
rolled to the far end of the hay, by road.
The engine stopped, the man unsnapped his safety belt and I helped him out. He took a wallet from his overalls and counted the dollar bills, shaking his head.
"That's quite a ride, son."
"We think so. It's a good product we're selling."
"It's your friend, that's selling!"
"Oh ?"
"I'll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I'll wager, can't he now?"
"How come you say that ?"
"The girl, of course. An airplane ride to my granddaughter, Sarah!" As he spoke he watched the Travel Air, a distant silver mote in the air, circling the farmhouse. He spoke as a calm man speaks, noting the dead twig in the yard has just sprouted blossoms and ripe apples.
"Since she's born, that girl's been wild to death about high places. Screams. Just terrified. Sarah'd no more climb a tree than she'd stir hornets barehand. Won't climb the ladder to the loft, won't go up there if the Flood was rising in the yard. The girl's a wonder with machines, not too bad around animals, but heights, they are a caution to her! And there she is up in the air."
He talked on about this and other special times; he remembered when the barnstormers used to come through
Galesburg
, years ago. and Monmouth, flying two wingers the same as we flew, but doing all kinds of crazy stunts with them.
I watched the distant Travel Air get bigger, spiral down over the field in a bank steeper than I'd ever fly with a girl afraid of heights, slip over the corn and the fence and touch the hay in a threepoint landing that was dazzling to watch. Donald Shimoda must have been flying for a good long while, to land a Travel Air that way.